Book Review: Thomas Paine and the Promise of
America by Harvey J. Kaye

We are living and working in the very days and nights of the American Emergency, the climactic American Crisis.

Our elections are bought and our government is run by and for the major
transnational corporations. The president announced in 2002 his illegal
presidential policy that we can and will attack other nations first,
waging war on them, when he so decides. He is now
waging, as if in our names, a bloody war of aggression against Iraq, a
crime against humanity under the Nuremberg principles that we and our
allies established and enforced with hangings after World War II. The
president, the vice-president, and their factors sold this war to
Congress with twistings and lies that were crafted to infuriate and
terrorize us about Iraq's alleged connections to Al Qaeda and
endangerment to us—all of which did not exist.

In polls, six of 10 Americans do not believe the president is honest.
Yet he has three more years of dictatorial control over our nuclear and
other arms and our Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps. Professor
Kaye's book on Thomas Paine could not be more timely, for exactly now
again these are the times that try men's and women's souls.
Paine's biography occupies only two-fifths of Kaye's text; in the rest
the Wisconsin professor hops, skips, and jumps through our history
since Paine, citing various posthumous characterizations of him, from
Teddy Roosevelt's “filthy little atheist” to T.V. Smith's “the
harbinger in darkness of our democratic way.” But there are plenty of
biographies of Paine, and Kaye does establish the important historical
fact that Paine, this poorly educated son of an English corset maker,
has been unfairly and often maliciously excluded from the Founding
Fathers, and for consequential reasons.

One of those Founding Fathers, he indubitably was. His pamphlet, Common
Sense, at less than 50 pages, both sensationally converted the
colonists to revolution and declared America's founding role in world
democracy in our modern period. Yet, Kaye shows, Paine has been
vilified again and again for his religious radicalism in The Age of
Reason and because he—and only he—among the founders believed in the
“genius and talents” of common people, was a common man himself, and
understood and passionately advocated economic as well as political
democracy.

For example, Paine proposed, in The Rights of Man, a public welfare
system to offset economic inequalities, and, in Agrarian Justice, the
payment of a certain tidy sum to every person on their 21st birthday
and the payment of another such sum every year to every person 50 or
older. Certainly, as Kaye insists, in Washington, DC, there should be a
statue of Paine or a monument to him like Jefferson's, such as on the
Mall. In fact Paine should be on Mount Rushmore.

Kaye reminds us, too, that there is much to draw us to Paine again in
this, our crisis. It was Paine, who had to go to work at 13, who
announced the principle of American government as the “equal rights of
man.” Paine, a crewman on a British privateer, who wrote, “We have it
in our power to begin the world over again.” Paine, a dissenter in
England, who wrote, “The birth day of a new world is at hand.”

It was Paine, a self-educated bookworm, who first proposed a
constitutional convention among the colonies. Paine, an editor of a
Pennsylvania magazine, who wrote, “It is yet too soon to write the
history of the Revolution,” Paine, a founding member of the first
American Anti-Slavery Society, who wrote, “My country is the world. To
do good is my religion.” Paine, a fugitive from the armed minions of
the King of England for “seditious libel,” who then very narrowly
escaped beheading under the French guillotine.

And it was Thomas Paine who proposed that the United States help form
an “Association of Nations” in “a new epoch of history for all
peoples.” Our cause, Paine proclaimed, was “to see it in our power to
make a world happy—to teach mankind the art of being so—to exhibit, on
the theater of the universe a character hitherto unknown.”
He died on June 8, 1809, and was buried, with no national dignitaries
present, in New Rochelle, New York. A well-meaning admirer, undertaking
to rebury him in England, lost his bodily remains. Three-and-a-half
years from the 200th anniversary of his death, it is again “time to
stir. ... time for every man to stir,” and every woman. “We are a
people upon experiments,” he proclaimed, “It is an age of revolutions,
in which everything may be looked for.” His body is lost but his spirit
is with us. By the anniversary of his death, we well may have either
lost, perhaps for good, or re-secured, the American dream he invented.